ICology Blog

If you ask anybody they'll probably tell you they get too many emails at work. But did you receive 26 million emails? Hopefully not. But that's how many emails Bananatag looked at and found some really helpful trends and data points for internal communicators who aren't sure what's happening with their emails.

What will be helpful to communicators is that Bananatag has discovered an industry standard or benchmark for communicators to measure their own email performance against. Overall (across the 26 million emails), they found that the average open rate is 79% per email and the click rate is 15%.

It's particularly interesting how the open rates very dramatically by industry, showing some of the unique behaviors of employees in those markets. Open rates aren't the only important measurement metric, but it's interesting to see that while the technology industry has the highest open rate at 92%, they also have the lowest click-through rate (8%). Whereas healthcare has the lowest open rate (69%), they have the highest click rate (20%). Which is better? Tough to say.

With email, I think of it as platform agnostic. What I mean by this is that you can read email on a physical PC/laptop or on a phone/tablet. Either way, the experience for employees should be the same. What Bananatag found in the 26 million emails is that 88% of all opens took place on the desktop, leaving only 12% for mobile. And with clicks, the desktop comes in at 94% and mobile at 6%. This last statistic does make more sense to me, given that whatever the employee might be clicking through may not be enabled for mobile or tough to read and respond to on their phone. What platform are your employees reading company emails on? This is something for communicators to think of, regardless of the size of the business.

And what about the size of the business? Well that matters, too. The smaller the business, the higher the open rate and click rate. This makes sense for two reasons. For one, in smaller businesses, emails are probably more personal and pertinent to the day-to-day business. And two, smaller business are likely sending and receiving less so employees have fewer emails to manage. So what's the lesson to big business? Send emails to smaller distribution lists so that the messages can be more relevant.

And relevancy and timeliness (sometimes related, sometimes not) is where I think email performance can improve. Would you be happy with 79% open rate and 15% click rate? I wouldn't be. Let's face it, you're never going to average 100% on anything. But where communicators should focus is on the click rate. This is an opportunity to make your content more relevant, interesting and entertaining which will encourage your readers to take more of an interest in the content.